


coalition government

by louis_quatorze



Series: coalition government [1]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Politics, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 12:38:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12365967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louis_quatorze/pseuds/louis_quatorze
Summary: How do you know Professor Guardiola, Herr Lahm?





	coalition government

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saltstreets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltstreets/gifts).



> I am not 100% sure this follows the prompt, but the prompt did activate a wildly self-indulgent politics AU I've been kicking around in my head for years, so...hope that works too?
> 
> Translation into Chinese available: [【翻译】coalition government](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12508520)

WELT: Pep Guardiola, the Catalan activist, referred to you as “perhaps the most intelligent player in the game” recently. High praise, especially coming from what many would call an ideological opposite. Do you know Dr. Guardiola, Herr Lahm? 

*

What do you do after a breakup, after ten years? If you were Philipp, you went to political lectures. The slightly stuffy kind, in a university lecture hall in the evening, attended by earnest young men, stubborn middle-aged ones, and whatever Philipp was. 

He felt vaguely rebellious walking in, like he was transgressing somehow. That somehow Timo would be upset with him, scowling about how Philipp spent enough time on politics during the day, why did he have to bother with them in his spare time. Perhaps Timo might be. Philipp didn’t care how he felt about things any more. As far as he was concerned, there was no Timo. And if there was no Timo, Philipp could do whatever he wanted. Up to, and including, lectures by visiting political-science professors. 

Guardiola wasn’t Philipp’s usual style, but he was intrigued enough by the ideas to come to the public lecture at Humboldt. It was slightly more crowded than the ones Philipp remembered from Munich. Guardiola was a minor star for the sort of earnest youth Philipp hadn’t even been when he was an undergrad, but his book had been surprisingly well-written and considered, even if Philipp only could agree with about half of it, and even that when pressed. Still, it was something to do, something for Philipp himself.

The lecture was, perhaps, a bit more engaging than Philipp anticipated, Guardiola’s intensity as he stalked the stage making it much livelier than the lectures Philipp remembered. Philipp had even asked a question despite his dislike of speaking in English, one he’d been formulating since he’d read Guardiola’s book, and been mostly satisfied by the answer. It was, all in all, a pleasant solo night out.

He dawdled as he left, which perhaps explained why he was noticed. 

“You asked the question about agricultural subsidies, yes?”

Philipp stopped, cocking his head to consider Guardiola, suddenly next to him. “Yes.” 

“I have to admit, it was something I’d been thinking about myself.” Guardiola smiled, shrugging his shoulders. “Are you on faculty here? I haven’t seen you.”

“Ahh…no.” Philipp smiled himself. That possibility had, thankfully, disappeared. “Philipp Lahm. I’m an MdB.” He extended his hand.

Guardiola shook it. “Ahh, so someone at the Bundestag is paying attention!” He laughed softly, letting Philipp’s hand drop. “Connected to the Lahm who published in Journal of Political Economy a few years back?”

“That was me,” Philipp said, unable to hold back his smile. He’d been proud of that publication, even though he had already decided to shift his focus. Something to leave academia by, perhaps, although that was a bit sentimental for Philipp’s normal line of thinking. “I am pleased someone has read it.” 

“It was brilliant. I wondered why I never saw anything else.” 

Philipp shrugged. “A change in career paths.” 

“Congratulations.” 

*

It was not inaccurate. Philipp had met Pep that way, and it would have been easy to tell the story – he had, sometimes. It was the safe version of the story. It didn’t include Pep inviting him to dinner, a stylish place that Philipp, in a year of living in Berlin, had never heard of, but was filled by people who looked comfortable in the slick surroundings. Timo would have liked it. Philipp appreciated that the food was good. 

It didn’t include Pep inviting him to his place, temporary accommodations not far from the university, furnished with inoffensive Scandinavian-style furniture and generic except for the bedding. (Pep said, he liked to have his own bedding when staying anywhere longer than a few weeks, and it was something that Philipp had never thought about so it had stuck in his head.) It didn’t include that Philipp had stayed the night.

*

Guardiola – Pep, he’d become, somewhere in the night – was only the second person Philipp had slept with. Philipp had felt a vague annoyance at that, like he should only have had one in his entire life, or that he should have had many by now, and either way Timo had taken that from him. It was irrational, and it didn’t matter, but that was frequently how he felt about Timo.

Pep wasn’t very much like Timo. Philipp kept a catalogue of ways. Looks were obvious – dark eyes, dark hair cropped close to his head (where it wasn’t thinning entirely), tanned skin, where Timo was pale and generally clean-shaven, still with the shaggy blond hair that had so attracted Philipp in the first place. Timo was slightly taller, slightly broader. They dressed different, carried themselves differently. 

Beyond visuals, it was the same. Timo had been relatively quiet, preferring to chime in with a cutting comment than to carry a conversation. Pep would start talking with his bookcase, if no one was around to carry a conversation. He was exuberant, all energy and waving hands, instead of Timo‘s cultivated air of detached reserve. And what they talked about – while Timo had, seemingly, supported Philipp’s move towards politics, he hadn’t liked discussing the topic with Philipp, any more than he’d had when they were young and Philipp had thought he’d wanted to go into finance. Philipp hadn’t minded it when he was twenty. Maybe he’d had other things to talk about then. 

Pep, though, Pep talked about nothing else. Pep talked politics with an enthusiasm Philipp briefly recognized from late nights in his PhD days, only (mostly) sober. It was a different tone to how the staff Philipp had started to gather around him, less about what needed to (and could be) done now, more about the theoreticals. Philipp had made his choice to get away from theoreticals, move into practicals, but he found himself enjoying the debates Pep kept drawing him into. It was…refereshing, maybe. He’d pushed that side of himself down over the past couple of years. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

They rarely agreed. It didn’t seem to matter.

*

Berlin was a necessity, not a choice. If Philipp was left to his own devices, he never would have left Munich. That was his city, and he loved it with a sentimentality that he rarely extended. But his ambitions always overcame his sentiment, and he left. Timo had been thrilled. Philipp supposed he knew why, now. 

But Pep was a tourist, a visitor, and he wanted to see things. Somehow, Philipp was the one who accompanied him, playing tour guide to a city he’d lived in for over a year but still felt awkward in. Pep, though, had that sweeping confidence, the sense that he could fit in anywhere, or any city at least, although like Philipp, he loved his home best.

So with Pep, he went places. Museums. Bookshops. Restaurants, bars, the kind of places that Philipp didn’t even know in Munich. Several nights a week, a blur of dimmed lights and dark wood that formed backdrops to the continuing refinement of his thoughts on government, society, civilization. It wasn’t his city, but Philipp felt like he was starting to understand it a bit.

“You need to make it yours,“ Pep had said. Philipp had never liked people who tried to advise him – it always seemed to come with an air of condescension, telling the small boy what to do – but it somehow went better with Pep. Pep never seemed to see him as anything but an equal, just a slightly younger one, and sought Philipp’s opinion as much as he gave his own. 

Philipp didn’t like what it suggested, that this was a novelty at his age. 

Or maybe it was that Pep’s advice mostly involved confirmation what Philipp already suspected, if not outright knew. Make Berlin his own. Dream bigger.

“You’d be wasted on finance,” Pep had said, when Philipp told him the position he wanted, in the future. 

Philipp had started to think that himself. It was nice to have it confirmed, by someone with such a reputation.

*

Philipp knew Pep had a wife. Children. He supposed that should bother him, considering how things with Timo had ended. But then, Philipp had never been mad at the boys Timo had slept with, only Timo – he had been the one to make the choices he did. Timo knew what he was doing. Philipp assumed that Pep did too. It wasn’t his problem.

He had never pictured himself as the other woman, but there was a certain thrill in it. There was some relief, too, that Pep wasn’t his – that Philipp wasn’t supposed to be anything but a distraction, someone to see a few nights a week for sex and arguments. Philipp’s days and choices were his own. His space stayed his own. There was no we – and there was something delightful about being so selfish, now.

Pep had an expiration date. Pep was leaving in a few months. Pep had a real home to go back to. If Philipp was being honest, he was glad of it. Pep was fun, but Pep was exhausting. Pep was always on, always talking, always with some kind of discussion and issue to bring up, always as energetic as he was on stage even when it was just him and Philipp in that IKEA-furnished bedroom. Philipp wasn’t sure he could deal with it, if it went on longer. Sometimes he wondered how Pep’s wife did. 

It was a good thing Philipp didn’t pride himself on being a good person. Everything with Pep would show him he wasn’t.

*

When his fellowship was up, Pep went home. Berlin was quieter. Philipp stopped going out. He had plans, now. 

*

It was several months later that Philipp got an email. He stared at it for longer than he should have, kept blinking at it throughout the work day, and finally brought it to Andi in the evening.

Andi looked at it and passed it back to Philipp, unimpressed. “A sincere congratulations, it looks to me.”

“But why?” Philipp frowned. It felt like it should be something different, something with more of a motive. He and Pep had ended things, which to Philipp, meant pushing him to the past.

“Because he heard about the new appointment, and wished to congratulate you about it?” 

“Why would he do that?” 

“Not everyone scorches the earth behind them.”

And Philipp knew that, because Andi stayed friends with several of his exes, which had always seemed bizarre to Philipp. Had, at least, but there was part of him that missed just talking with Pep. There was no theory in the Bundestag.

“Are you going to email him back?” 

*

LAHM: He was an early supporter of my bid for Chancellor – I suppose you could call us old friends. One doesn’t always have to agree with their friends, right?

**Author's Note:**

> I know nothing about German politics, and that this is a wildly self-indulgent politics AU also means I mess with timelines a bit too (it all makes sense in my head, but maybe not on the page). Thanks for bearing with me!


End file.
